Your Enemy and Mine: The Media

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Fully complicit in the wars on Iraq and Libya and Syria, the media came baying out of its kennel in support of the missile attack on Syria last Saturday morning. Trump, May and Macron lied to get the attack going and then lied again to justify what they had done. Macron is stripping Bashar al Assad of his Legion d’Honneur whereas, for lying and violating international law, he should be stripped of his job. So should the tweeter-in-chief, Donald Trump, and Theresa May. The sight of British MPs standing up in the House of Commons one after the other to repeat her untruths was a truly repellent sight. The ‘mother of parliaments’ had been turned into a frowsy old tart.

These three had no proof that the Syrian government was behind the chemical weapons attack in Douma. The evidence is now pouring in is that there was no such attack. There was a set-up by the takfiris and the usual pack of terrorist enablers, rushing into the clinic screaming ‘Chemicals! Chemicals!’ and videoing the people there as they hosed them down and pretended to be treating the symptoms of a chemical weapons attack. This is the evidence of doctors and other medical staff. No-one nearby heard of a chemical weapons attack or saw it. All say it was a fake, as it was, sucked up yet again and presented as truth by an ever-accommodating media. The only gas attacks we have had have been verbal, from the White House, 10 Downing St and the Elysee Palace, smelly and disgusting to hear but fortunately not lethal.

As was the case after the alleged chemical weapons attack on the outskirts of Damascus in August, 2013, the fate of the apparently dead children shown in some of the videos shot by the takfiris and/or their supporters in Douma is not even an issue. Were they killed so they could be used for terrorist propaganda? Even the thought is monstrous but then the atrocities committed by these groups have been monstrous.

The media showed no interest in the children who appeared to have been killed by the takfiris in 2013 and it is showing no interest in the children of Douma either, who they were, what actually happened to them and where they were buried if they actually died. The use of children as terrorist props has been a running feature of this war. Has it actually gone as far as the killing of children, possibly Alawis, who are entirely disposable as far as the takfiris are concerned, men, women and children? The issue is real, it is shocking, it is appalling and the images of these children are heartbreaking. We need to know the truth but the media is not interested now that the takfiri-White Helmets propaganda has served the purpose of bringing on a missile strike. Dead children are apparently only relevant only if it can be shown the ‘regime’ killed them.

The real evidence of chemical weapon attacks or pending attacks lay in the workshops where Jaysh al Islam stored and cooked up its material. In one there were dockets for the receipt of material on Jaysh al Islam letterhead. In an underground passage a journalist found more documents, charred but still readable, referring to missile attacks in the centre of Damascus and projects for the use of chemical weapons, including white phosphorus. Enormous quantities of ammunition, especially mortar shells, were stacked in various parts of this underground city.

Virtually none of this was reported in the mainstream media. On the basis of allegations by a terrorist group and its White Helmet enablers, Trump, May and Macron fired more than 100 missiles into Syria. They might have been told lies but they were lies they wanted to hear and wanted the world to believe, in order to push further their attack on Syria and Russia. Trump boasted of destroying Syria’s ‘chemical weapons arsenal.’ In fact, Syria does not have a chemical weapons arsenal. It does not have chemical weapons, period. They were all destroyed under the authority of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) in 2013/14. The OPCW has continually monitored Syria and there is no evidence of a revived chemical weapons program. The alleged chemical weapons plant at Barzeh was what the Syrian government and its staff says it was, a scientific research institute, now destroyed as thoroughly as the Al Shifa pharmaceuticals factory in Khartoum, the biggest in Sudan and a central element in its health care system, hit by 14 Cruise missiles in August, 1998, on the orders of President Clinton. The motive for the attack was the same lie, that it was actually producing chemical weapons.

The media is not revealing or exposing but covering up. Through the propaganda it has been running over the past eight years it is fully complicit in the attack on Syria. Douma came so hard on the heels of the Skripal affair that one has to wonder whether they were planned in sequence. Sergei Lavrov has information showing that the agent used against the Skripals was BZ, developed in the US, incapacitating but not deadly, explaining why the Skripals did not die virtually immediately, had the active agent been Novichok as claimed. The Swiss lab which discovered the BZ in the sample it was given is refusing to confirm Lavrov’s claim, while not denying it. If true, the admission would pull down the roof on the American and British governments.

The British delegate to the OPCW has now conceded that his government did not have the evidence it claimed to have had. He said the OPCW had not determined the origin of the agent or the country where it was produced. This seems unlikely and it is not the same as saying the OPCW had not been able to determine origin and source. The scientists would almost certainly have their suspicions if not a short list of countries which could have produced the BZ agent, but unfortunately, they might not include Russia. The issue is so explosive, politically, that no-one should expect anything from the OPCW but waffle and uncertainty, tilted against Russia if the UK and the US can exert enough pressure, whatever it actually knows.

When the British government expelled Russian diplomats, and persuaded other governments to do the same, it did not know which country produced the agent that incapacitated the Skripals (unless of course MI5 set this up, with the full authority of the May government). Even as far as it goes this admission by the British OPCW delegate is damning. Britain launched a missile attack on another country on the basis of supposition, speculation and innuendo. It is truly shocking but the British media is refusing to hold the politicians to account, preferring endless attacks on Jeremy Corbyn.

The evidence coming out of Douma shows that there was no chemical weapons attack. It was yet another fabrication by the takfiris and their White Helmet terrorist enablers, another lie allowing another missile attack on Syria. Film coming out of Douma is showing an extraordinary underground network of tunnels which could not possibly have been built just with pickaxes, as Robert Fisk has suggested, but only with heavy drilling equipment under the supervision of trained engineers. Did Jaysh al Islam just happen to have such specialists on hand, and if not, where did they get them from? These tunnels were big enough in some cases for motorized transport and were used for getting people (including prisoners moved from other areas of the Ghouta) in or out as well as for the movement of weapons.

Apart from the chemical weapon workshops, complete with dockets for the receipt of material on Jaysh al Islam letterhead, there were piles of charred documents found elsewhere referring to missile attacks in the centre of Damascus and projects for the use of chemical weapons, including white phosphorus. There were cells and cages for prisoners and great piles of weaponry, including thousands of mortar shells ready to be filled and fired. Somehow great stretches of the mainstream media have found none of this newsworthy, to the point of ignoring it altogether. Only Tucker Carlson has had the guts to pull the plug on it. For his bravery, he is being called a traitor, a Putin stooge and all the rest of it.

It is the media that has run the war on Syria just as it enabled the wars on Iraq and Libya and almost any other war you can think of. There has been virtually no ‘reporting’ of Syria in the mainstream as the word used to be understood. There has been misinformation and disinformation falsely packaged as news. There has been the enabling of a dishonest government narrative, complicity, in other words, not objectivity and balance. The media is deceiving the people whose interests it should be protecting and protecting the interests of those who are deceiving them. We have seen this so many times before that no-one should be surprised but it is still disgraceful. In and over Syria the media has played up or played down, according to need, playing up anything that might damage the ‘regime’ and playing down to the point of ignoring it altogether anything that might damage the ‘rebels.’ The ‘fourth estate’ has completely lost its way and should not be surprised that it has lost the trust and confidence of its readers and viewers as well.

*(An image grab taken from a video released by the Douma City Coordination Committee shows unidentified volunteers spraying a man with water at a make-shift hospital following an alleged chemical attack on the town of Douma, Syria, April 7, 2018. Image courtesy of AFP)

Jeremy Salt has taught at the University of Melbourne, Bosporus University (Istanbul) and Bilkent University (Ankara), specialising in the modern history of the Middle East. His most recent book is "The Unmaking of the Middle East. A History of Western Disorder in Arab Lands" (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008.)